August 10, 1995

At Home With Eudora Welty; Only the Typewriter Is Silent

By NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF

ACKSON, Miss. -- Eudora Welty has spent her life telling stories, and although her typewriter has now stopped, the stories keep flowing. On a recent 100-degree Mississippi morning, she leaned forward from a large blue chair in her parlor and began her latest.

"I know a good true story about Faulkner," she said, smiling a warm smile of mild conspiracy. "There was a lady -- we always say 'a lady' in the South -- I don't know who she was. She wrote to him and sent him a scene that she'd written. A love scene. 'Dear Mr. Faulkner,' she wrote. 'I thought you might like to read this. I wonder what you think of it.' He wrote back and said: 'I got the scene you sent me. It's not the way I would have done it, but honey, you go right ahead -- W. Faulkner.' "

Ms. Welty chuckled. "That was kind of him to respond at all, don't you think?" she said. " 'It's not the way I would have said it,' " she said, and shook her head. "You can imagine what it was like."

In 1943, William Faulkner wrote to another Mississippi lady, Eudora Welty, then 34. He had just happened upon her first novella, "The Robber Bridegroom," and was responding with unsolicited -- and unmeasured -- enthusiasm. "You're doing all right," he said.

The letter has been framed and hangs in an upstairs room within the brick and stucco Tudor-style house that she has lived in since 1924. In the same room is the wooden desk where she wrote the short stories, novels, essays and memoirs that have placed her among the most revered women of letters in America.

Somehow, Ms. Welty has not won a Nobel Prize. If you ask people in Mississippi why her literary diadem lacks that jewel, the response is usually one word: "politics," meaning that her books tend to skirt charged issues and that past Nobel recipients have perhaps benefited from byzantine campaigns.

Ms. Welty likes to say that she admires stories "about the interior of our lives" that are told "with love." And her own literary exercises in affection have earned her everything from the William Dean Howells medal for fiction (for the 1954 comic novel"The Ponder Heart") to the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (for her 1972 novella, "The Optimist's Daughter") to a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.

Ms. Welty would never dignify conversation about such an unseemly matter as personal acclaim. At 86, she remains every bit the "quiet, tranquil-looking, modest" woman whom Katherine Anne Porter introduced to the world in her 1941 preface to "A Curtain of Green," Ms. Welty's first collection of short stories. Ms. Welty's frame has grown frail, but not her blue eyes, which flicker like young candles when something engages her, which is nearly all the time. Ms. Welty speaks in a gentle voice that is as Mississippi as crape myrtles, and her talk, packed as it is with exuberant colloquialisms, makes it no trouble at all to see how she divined characters who say things like, "Hello, little bitty sweet old thing."

Picking up a new book, she exclaims, "Hot dog!" as she looks it over.

Words and the mysteries of their joinings are, of course, to Ms. Welty what bourbon is to a sipper. She is a fine speller who, as a schoolgirl, once correctly spelled all 82 counties in Mississippi -- a daunting thicket of syllables that includes Oktibbeha and Issaquena. "I was told by Diarmuid Russell, my agent, 'You're either a speller or you're not,' " she said. " 'If you can't help it, you don't deserve any credit for being a good speller, and you don't deserve any condemnation if you can't spell.' He put me in my place. I deserved it."

Everything, it seems, reminds her of a good story. Sometimes one word is sufficient tinder. When she hears "antipathy" in a conversation, she beams and says, "I love that word," and tells of Mark Twain's "invincible antipathy for the name of Samuel."

Trouble is the backbone of Ms. Welty's bittersweet stories, and spirited banter of the sort that crackles through family novels like "Losing Battles" (1970) and "Delta Wedding" (1946) lends them their vigorous gait. She says she is not an especially autobiographical fiction writer. While personal experience informs her short stories and novels, she says it isn't often reproduced in them, and neither is she. "I don't think of myself as participating," she said. She does, however, admit that "you certainly don't write with a blank mind -- you're writing through and as a result of sympathy."

There are exceptions. In her story "Powerhouse," she describes a musician who is "in a trance; he's a person of joy, fanatic. He listens as much as he performs, a look of hideous, powerful rapture on his face."

Ms. Welty said the story came "straight out of Fats Waller."

"I wrote that when I got home from a Fats Waller concert," she said. "I never would have tried in my right mind to think I could describe anything like that, but I was carried away by that concert. It was here in Jackson. It was just an outpouring."

In the same way, Ms. Welty said, her 1949 collection of linked short stories, "The Golden Apples," was affected by noises that drifted in through her window. "This college across the street used to be a very small college," she said, pointing toward the shady campus of Belhaven College. "Every summer they practiced there for the big piano recital, just like in the book. I was very familiar with the music. I heard it night and day. It was pouring in at all times. Naturally, it influenced my stories."

Ms. Welty has said that more than anything else, "loving to read made me wish to write." She is forthcoming about some of the writers she learned from: Chekhov (reading his stories "from a very early age was just electrifying"), S. J. Perelman ("I am crazy about him"), Ring Lardner and Twain. She is just as candid about a writer she abhors, Henry Miller.

Miller came through Jackson one year to pay a call on her, an encounter that went rapidly awry and concluded in a scene that, with its mixture of the hilarious and the peculiar, sounds like a Eudora Welty novel.

Miller and Ms. Welty shared the same publisher at the time, and it was the publisher's idea that Miller should write a travel book about the United States, driving all over the country in a car with a body made completely of glass. When it was proposed that Miller pay a visit to Ms. Welty to seek guidance in planning his itinerary, her mother, Chestina Welty, banned Miller from entering their home. She had heard that he wrote pornography, and she wanted no part of such a man.

"The whole idea was so ridiculous," Ms. Welty vexed. "I got my three or four boyfriends to go with me everywhere I took him. He did come. Dullest man I ever saw in my life. He wasn't interested in anything outside himself, that was the truth."

Ms. Welty inherited the abiding decorum that pervades her fiction as much from her parents as from Chekhov. Christian Welty was, his daughter said, both "a Yankee" from Ohio and the general manager of the Lamar Life Insurance Company. On Sundays, Ms. Welty and her younger brother, Walter, walked with him to his office, and the children tried out his typewriter while he opened his mail. "It used to be wonderful to be in Daddy's office," she said. "That's where I fell in love with the typewriter."

In 1924, Christian Welty commissioned a Texas architect to design a new headquarters for Lamar Life. The 13-story building became Jackson's first skyscraper, and so pleased was Mr. Welty with the mint-white, deftly filigreed result that he asked the architect to draw him up a new house. Ms. Welty still lives in it.

"Well, it's my home, and I like it here," she said. "My friends and my family lived here. I could have gone anywhere and did. I went to college at the University of Wisconsin and Columbia; I wanted to go to college away from home. I grew up in a traveling family. We traveled in summer, and I went on business trips with my father to New York and Chicago. We'd go to the theater. I had it both ways."

As she grew older, along with her valise Ms. Welty carried a typewriter. "When I arrived in a city, I'd go to a typewriter shop, rent a table, bring it to my room and I'd be in business," she said.

Before settling down to write fiction, Ms. Welty wrote a society column for a Jackson newspaper -- "that was all they thought a woman could do; most boring thing in the world," she said -- and worked for a radio station. In the mid-1930's she also spent some time touring Depression-worn Mississippi towns as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration. With her, she took not a typewriter but a camera that she used to take the famous photographs of small-town Mississippi life that in 1971 became the book "One Time, One Place." Ms. Welty thought to say that she saw no relation between her photographs -- which she refers to as "snapshots" -- and her fiction. Then she reconsidered.

"It is true," she said, "that what I'm interested in is the revelation of the instant. Like the flash of a camera, the record of a movement or an emotion is what fiction is, really."

Going to New York for college, skimming around her home state taking photographs of political rallies and hog killings, as well as writing, made Ms. Welty a rather unusual young Mississippi woman. "Days when I was coming along, girls didn't do that kind of thing much," she said. "They stayed home and went out to dances and things, got married and raised a family." Marriage for her, she said, "never came up."

These days, Ms. Welty said, she is not doing any writing. "I want to," she said. "The reason is purely physical. I've got arthritis in my hand, and I can't use a typewriter. I keep telling myself that's just a feeble excuse. I'm not looking for an excuse."

Her back pains her, too, so she spends most of her time in her downstairs rooms, surrounded by photographs of friends like Diarmuid Russell, the writer Reynolds Price and her nurse's young granddaughter. There are plenty of old friends in her bookcases, too, like Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green and Peter Taylor. "I love Peter -- I hate for him to be gone," she said of the Tennessee novelist, who died last year.

Ms. Welty has always made friends easily, and in Jackson she remains "locally underfoot," as she sometimes puts it, close to everyone, from the society women who sip tea at the country club to Bill Matheos, the owner of Bill's Greek Tavern, her favorite restaurant.

"Bill was arrested three times and sent back to Greece," she said. "He'd jump off the boat, kiss the ground, say, 'God Bless America,' and promptly be arrested and sent back to Greece." He finally solved the problem, she said, by marrying a woman from Mississippi. "Now he can stay," she said. "Everywhere he goes, he says, 'God Bless America.' "

Mr. Matheos likes to give Ms. Welty birthday parties. For one of them, he hired a belly dancer. "She was a pretty belly dancer," Ms. Welty said. "On her navel it said 'Eudora Welty I Love You.' "

It was sweltering outside, the oaks and camellias hung languid, but in her parlor, with a fan at her back, Ms. Welty looked fresh and cool in blue and white striped trousers. She began talking about another departed friend who lingers on her bookshelf. "I never dreamed I'd meet him -- I didn't try to," she said of Faulkner. But in 1948, some mutual friends took her to see him in Oxford, Miss. "Just a neighborly visit," she said. "He was very humorous and gentle and quiet. He didn't say much. He liked a funny tale. We stood around the piano and sang hymns. All of us had grown up with the same hymns."

The next year, Faulkner asked her to go sailing with him on a lake in a boat he had built. "I was so happy he invited me," she said. "I had trouble getting in the boat. It was out a little from shore, and I was so shy I couldn't say, 'You mean get wet?' Anyway, that's what I did. Just waded out in the mud, got in the boat, and he took me sailing. I don't think either of us spoke. That's all right. It was kind of magical to me. I was in the presence."